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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "With the main Pirate Bay website experiencing DNS issues, downtime and uncertainty about both the lawsuits and potential sale to GGF, a Pirate Bay clone has already gone online. True to their principles, someone at TPB put up a torrent with a 21.3 GB copy of the site as it exists today. And now that archive is alive, at BTArena.net. Linus' old adage about backing up everything by putting it on FTP and letting the world mirror it may need to be updated. Torrents are much more efficient." "Downtime" may be a nice word for it; reader Underholdning writes "The Register has a story about a Swedish court ordering ISPs to disconnect The Pirate Bay or face a massive daily fine. The reason for the shutdown was an upcoming civil lawsuit by copyright holders. As usual, Torrentfreak has an updated story. It seems like the takedown until now has been successful." Believe what you will; the site itself says they'll be back up "in a few hours."

Yes the website is up, but the tracker is still non-functional. How am I supposed to download my half-finished 10 GB torrents of "ifeelmyself.com" or "cdgirls.com" or "playboy.com" if the tracker is not working.:-(

Yes the website is up, but the tracker is still non-functional. How am I supposed to download my half-finished 10 GB torrents of "ifeelmyself.com" or "cdgirls.com" or "playboy.com" if the tracker is not working.:-(

Upgrade your torrent client. The decentralized tracker in many torrent clients is automatically used if the main tracker can't be reached. I grabbed a torrent yesterday and didn't realize it was a TPB one until I looked at its details. It's less efficient at finding seeds and such (because you do

That's not the solution. My Azureus client has decentralized tracking in Azureus, and it works just fine with my dialup connection, but not with my DSL modem. I have no clue why one would work but not the other.

Doesn't Pirate Bay have *any* working trackers? I'm using tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce which is the most-generalized form I can think of, but still it refuses to connect.

DSL Modem is going through a firewall/router that's not set up to forward BT ports? I'm not familiar with your setup, but in my experience dialup was always straight to the computer (windows firewall etc, where Azureus could ask for permission) where DSL was usually on a LAN setup with a router (which usually contains a builtin firewall)...

There is no irony. Trademarks are not intellectual property - their purpose is to prevent people from impersonating you and harming your brand image, copyrights and patents prevent people from copying your work/invention and unfairly competing against you by selling it without having to pay development costs.

There's none. Not only are the other posters correct in pointing out that trademarks and copyright are very different legal concepts, but it sounds to me that the word is being used by its casual definition, rather than the legal one.

It's as in the phrase "the Statue of Liberty is one of New York's trademarks". It doesn't mean New York will sue you for trademark infringement if you put a photo of the statue on your website, its just that its image is commonly associated with the city of New York.

Like the saying goes, "information wants to be free". Not only does information want to be free, but the Streisand Effect [wikipedia.org] is in full effect here. Clearly TPB was a popular site among a very devoted crowd. The harder people try to squish it, the faster it will pop up everywhere.

This reminds me of when the MPAA got all uppity about DVD Jon's DeCSS [wikipedia.org] code and tried to wipe the code off the interwebs. The response was for thousands, if not millions of people to post the code as poetry, works of art, one really terrible song and a even stenographically encoded into images. The harder the MPAA fought against it, the more people pushed back to move the code into the realm of free speech and thwart them. It cost the MPAA big bucks to send out take down notices to everyone while it cost the average Joe nothing to dump the code into paintshop, add some colors and call it "art" on his web page. Obviously it's a bit harder to perpetuate an archive of TPB as "art", but it's still relatively easy to pick up a copy off the torrent network and restart the site on an ISP with lax laws and rules.

Weather you agree with what TPB was up to or not, it is interesting to see how ineffective it is to try and hold back information on the web these days. Perhaps 20 years ago it would have been trivial to shut down the ISPs hosting this type of information, but today it looks like it's darn near impossible.

It'll be fun to watch this over the next few months and see who's interest wanes first. Will the government or the Pirates give up first? What do you think?

Step 1) RAR the whole thing, break it down into, say, 50MB files
Step 2) View those files in Notepad, which you are running from the copy of Windows XP that you downloaded last week from TPB
Step 3) Copy the ASCII text into a new image in the copy of Photoshop that you downloaded three months ago from TPB
Step 4) Apply some filters, gradients, throw in some flames and fractals at random, maybe a lens flare or two
Step 5) Be sure not to add too much crap to it, so that it can be OCR'ed later
Step 6) Save as ThePirateBaySiteRipPart1of4200.rar.JPG and post it somewhere

This reminds me, rather, of Suprnova. Mostly because it was the MPAA's squishing of it what gave ThePirateBay the popularity it enjoys today, so the fact that the MPAA is trying the exact same tactic against the exact same enemy once again is both laughable, and more than a bit pitiful.

So the only doubt in my mind is, who's gonna be the third-generation Suprnova? my vote's on Mininova, but my vote was on them last time as well yet it was TPB who continued the legacy.

Their tracker uses the free Opentracker [wikipedia.org]. It's maintain the server infrastructure that is the problem, and requires a localized concentration of resources. As it is the people passing around the archive are scattered geeks, and they can't put together the resources to establish a centralized tracker.

AC may not have given any details (or wiki), but using argumentum ad hominem isn't nice either.

I might lose a point for being off-topic here, but really it is a usage question. While you are correct in stating that usage experts consider it wrong, the phrase has come into common usage to mean what I intended. The debate regarding whether a prescriptive or descriptive approach to linguistics is appropriate is open to heated academic debate. Moreover, the meaning of "begs the question," when used as prescribed, is not really contained in the English translation, but borrowed from the logicians' Lati

it's important as a symbol for people that download and don't give a shit what the law says. it's also a great way to divert attention and resources away from prosecuting other torrent sites by making tpb public enemy number 1. who cares if half the peers are hacking and the warez contains trojans; at least that's lawyer money that they can't throw at someone else. it keeps bittorrent, IP rights, and issues of net neutrality and surveillance in the public debate.

TPB works in several positive, intangible ways, and is important as a lawyer/enforcement magnet so other sites can stay under the radar that much longer. every day TPB is up and running, i think everyone that isn't an **AA crony can smile a bit inside.

The "Man" managed to strangle AllofMP3.com by cutting off the credit card processing ability, but with TPB, there is no money to choke off. No client register to attack, no official records of user activity, and the site can be hosted by anyone with the bandwidth and storage.Long live TPB!

A back-up is all OK, but the people behind TPB (well I suppose it's them, because they use the same servers as TPB) is working on a decentralized replacement for TPB called openbittorrent.com [openbittorrent.com] and torrage.com [torrage.com]. This decentralized version will be almost impossible to take out both legally and technically, and according to the ideology behind TPB it will be more democratic.

I had heard about openbittorrent before but not torrage. This is amazing news! Now all one need is a site to collect hashes and make them searchable.If that could be achieved on something like Freenet then the MAFIAA would probably finally have to go after the seeds and leechers instead of the infrastructure.

If we take a look at the range of activities proscribed by the government, making no moral judgment here, just talking about stuff they don't want you to do, you'll never get rid of it. Take drugs. Some will say that the US is too permissive a society, that we can only get rid of them if we go totalitarian. You can't get more hardcore than Singapore, China, various Islamic countries with the death penalty for drug smuggling. Guess what? You can still get drugs there. China is doing their level best to suppress the Falun Gong and they're still around. The lions didn't do much to dissuade the Christians back in the early days. Ideas couldn't be suppressed when the only way to spread them was handwritten letters and walking tours. The printing press only made suppression more difficult and the internet is the printing press x100.

I suppose, in theory, one could impose filtering at the ISP level and stop the bulk of casual P2P traffic. But just think of what people did before the internet. Oh, that's right -- mix tapes for songs, file copy parties for software. There's just no way to stop it. If we still had Prohibition, that would be enough to stop me from drinking -- there's no way I'm going to risk so much for a shot of whiskey. But my lack of patronage wouldn't hurt the speakeasies a bit.

So, what would we see if total p2p filtering was successful? (which I still say it couldn't be.) Look at Cuba. Broadband costs too much there but flash drives are cheap. There's a thriving trade in flash drives, people copying and sharing away.

Ultimately, I think that the only viable solution will be a patronage system. The content will be given away for free and a tip jar will be set out for fans to contribute to. No, the vast majority of the people who watch the show won't be paying for it but if enough do so it can remain on the air, what's the problem? I'm sure the transition from our current media model will be a painful process but we're already seeing success in some areas.

I suppose, in theory, one could impose filtering at the ISP level and stop the bulk of casual P2P traffic.

.... at least until every single p2p client enabled encryption by default.

Ultimately, I think that the only viable solution will be a patronage system. The content will be given away for free and a tip jar will be set out for fans to contribute to.

That might work for music but how is it going to work for software or movies that cost tens of millions (or more) to produce? I suppose movies could still make money from the theaters but what happens to the game industry?

That might work for music but how is it going to work for software or movies that cost tens of millions (or more) to produce? I suppose movies could still make money from the theaters but what happens to the game industry?

Either a financier fronts them the money, they get a bank loan, or they work off of pre-orders. Joss Wheadon says he's looking for financing for a new show, fans pony up the money into an escrow. If he gets enough down, the series goes into production, knowing that there's a fixed number of guaranteed sales from the get-go and more could follow if the series is good.

As far as games go, companies might have to scale back a bit. Apogee and id made killings with the shareware model. Make a game in three parts,

Consortia of many gamers (or movie watchers) pool their resources and contract for games and movies to be produced. Will there be freeloaders? Of course but there would be anyway and you also dispense with the other freeloaders (marketroids and other hangers-on). As long as you get your game for $40 (or maybe $30 or $20) what does it matter?

Protip: Movies do not actually cost tens of millions. Most of the money goes for supporting spoiled Hollywood actors who for some reason are considered necessary for a profitable films and special effects that can actually be accomplished for a lot less. You don't really need that much money for a good film. You just need talent and skill and motivation.

Let aside the legal angle.
Let's say I want to make a torrent tracker, a TPB kind of site. Is there a package I could install that allows me to do that? I'm looking something that is as easy to install as Wordpress or something like that. Is there anything like that out there?

What's the use of a mirror of the torrent files if nobody else has the infrastructure to maintain the tracker? Even before this legal storm TPB has been having trouble dealing with the load on their servers.

Plus most of the torrents point to the PB tracker, which is unreachable at this point.

The grand-parent's fear is groundless I suspect. I don't know how many, but at least some of the torrents have their trackers set to openbittorrent already, or other trackers such as demonoid or sumotracker.

It doesn't have to necessarily be TPB's tracker software (Opentracker [wikipedia.org], which is not open but is free as in beer), any tracker server could work - and most of those are free and/or open. The problem is the load from managing all the connections is enormous and requires/real/ server hardware, which I don't think the community that is passing around the archive could put together, not to mention the networking requirements.

Even if some rich geek could provide the hardware and network backbone required to run

I'm currently downloading from a torrent I got from TPB before "the incident". The only thing I noticed is that the piratebay tracker is unreachable... but there are other trackers on the same list. Don't know where the program got those trackers (plus DHT and peer exchange) or how they got there... it just works.

They would have been added by whoever first created the torrents as alternate trackers, which wouldn't have been added to most of the torrents on TPB. I suppose someone could go through all the torrents and add alternate trackers, but then some tracker would have to handle the load.

We have, ourselves, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our Internets, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.
Even though large parts of Internets and many old and famous trackers have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Ifpi and all the odious apparatus of MPAA rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the ef-nets and darknets, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Internets, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the baywords.org, we shall fight on the/. and on the digg, we shall fight in the courts; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, the Internets or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the Anon Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in Cerf's's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

It would be interesting to see someone develop a distributed site mirroring protocol so that anyone with a server can opt-in to being a TPB mirror by downloading the archive and then getting real-time updates from one or more mirrors as more torrents are posted. The same distributed network idea for the tracker index sites as gets used for the file downloads.

With it being so easy, the sites could go offline after very short intervals. Imagine several thousand TPB mirrors at any one time, each one only up

Update your virus defs... it was a false positive and has been fixed, according to commenters at DSLReports.com [broadbandreports.com]. I verified it just a few minutes ago by browsing to the site in Firefox/AdBlock Plus with no problems.